The trials and tribulations of OpenSea

<p>OpenSea hasn't just offered the world a rather average looking NFT trading platform. It's also provided us with an excellent set of lessons concerning the risks posed by smart contracts and bad design.</p> <p>In this episode, I look at the recent problems they have faced, in which people's tokens are being bought at below-market prices and then instantly flipped for huge profits, due to a series of smart contract, web interface, and user experience design mistakes made by OpenSea.</p> <p>As such, it offers a lesson in:</p> <p>👍 what "approving transfers of tokens" is (and how it differs from actually transferring a token),</p> <p>💵 how users will take the cheapest option when it comes to gas fees, even if it carries long-term risks,</p> <p>🤔 why you need to think before you send instructions out to your users, and</p> <p>🏃 what front-running is.</p> <p>It's said that mistakes are the best teachers. But I prefer to learn from other people's mistakes whenever possible.</p> <p>(Note: in the episode I imply that OpenSea had been running on a shoe-string budget until recently, which is wrong: their most recent funding round is their fourth, with 2.1M$ in 2018, 23M$ and then another 100M$ in 2021, and 300M$ in 2022.)</p>